On reproche fréquemment aux plaidoiries de ralentir le temps du procès et de ne pas avoir de vraie utilité. En réalité, conclusions écrites et observations orales sont complémentaires. Une justice accessible et à l’écoute suppose un temps d’échange adapté à la nature du procès, à la complexité de l’affaire et aux enjeux du dossier. Un juge actif pendant la phase orale permet aussi de rassurer le justiciable sur la prise en considération de son dossier. Dans le souci d’une bonne administration (...) de la justice, il existe différentes manières de rétablir une forme d’harmonie entre l’écrit et l’oral. À toutes les étapes du procès, en première instance, en appel et devant le juge de cassation, la boîte à outils est, désormais, bien achalandée pour faire du sur-mesure. ll reste à en faire la promotion et se saisir pleinement de ces outils. (shrink)

A l'epoque hellenistique, la reflexion morale s'engage sur des voies nouvelles.

The Gods of our Ancient World are migrating toward the South. Pushed back by supermarkets, television shows and the rights of man divorced from himself, they have ended up taking refuge in the last Christian region that faces Islam: in Andalusia that is one of their last lands of asylum. They have left traces of their passage in our museums upon which we construct pyramids in order to feign our veneration for them. Now and then they accompany the silence of (...) a symphony to the rhythm of the high priest's baton. However, in the South they are alive. Accommodating themselves to the din of household appliances and of tourism, they appear sometimes in all the splendor of the Midi during the passage of the virgins of peace and bleeding christs. But most frequently they hide in the midst of the Andulusian festival, under the flanks of the fighting bulls or in taverns that are filled with raucous songs. Be it that they intrude upon a play in order to transform it into a ritual; be it that they honor art and sensuality in their celebrations — they choose for their appearances the blurred boundary between the world of the sacred and of the profane. (shrink)

La porno straight est un genre littéraire, photographique et cinématographique socialement et historiquement situé, facilement accessible, jusque dans l’univers domestique – le câble – et le domaine professionnel – les écrans de veille. Je ne connais pas la pornographie..

A defence of the 'pragmatic' theory of anaphora (which stresses the analogy between anaphora and deixis) against an argument put forward by Gareth Evans.

Я интерпретирую философские взгляды Вернера Гайзенберга как прагматизм и неметафизический реализм виттгенштайновского типа. «Замкнутая теория» – виттгенштайновское правило/концепт. В отличие от Бокулич, предпочитающей позицию Дирака относительно природы связей между различными физическими теориями, я отдаю предпочтение позиции Гайзенберга. Моя позиция, интерпретирующая Гайзенберга, также прямо противоположна позиции Поппера: критерием устоявшейся научной (замкнутой) теории является её нефальсифицируемость. -/- I interpret philosophical views of Werner Heisenberg as a pragmatism and non-metaphysical realism of a Wittgensteinian kind. The “closed theory” is a Wittgensteinian rule/concept. Unlike Alisa (...) Bokulich, favouring Dirac’s position about inter-theoretical relations, I favour Heisenberg’s one. My position, interpreting Heisenberg’s notion of a closed theory, is also in direct opposition to Popper’s one: the criterion of an established scientific (closed) theory is its non-falsifiability. (shrink)

Response to Alex Byrne's paper 'Knowing what I see'.

ABSTRACTWhat does it take for lawyers and others to think or talk about the same legal topic—e.g., defamation, culpability? We argue that people are able to think or talk about the same topic not when they possess a matching substantive understanding of the topic, as traditional metasemantics says, but instead when their thoughts or utterances are related to each other in certain ways. And what determines the content of thoughts and utterances is what would best serve the core purposes of (...) the representational practice within which the thought or utterance is located. In thus favoring a “relational model” in metasemantics, we share Ronald Dworkin's goal of explaining fundamental legal disagreements, and also his reliance on constructive interpretation. But what we delineate is a far more general and explanatorily resourceful metasemantics than what Dworkin articulated, which also bypasses some controversial implications for the nature of law that Dworkin alleged. (shrink)

In what is quite possibly the most famous passage of the De revolutionibus, Copernicus implies that nobody could ever place this supreme flaming torch that is the Sun in another or better place than that from which it can illuminate everything simultaneously, namely the centre of this extremely beautiful temple that is our world. Considering the fact that he leaves an interrogatory twist to this argument of convenience, and since he makes this statement without any justification as it seems entirely (...) evident to him, certain Copernicans choose to illustrate this by means of an analogy: if indeed the Sun must be positioned thus, it is because the most appropriate place for the torch intended to illuminate the room is at its centre, and not in one of its corners. Despite the heliosophy of the Renaissance having been shared by both geocentrists and Copernicans alike, this "torch" argument does not appear to have achieved much success: rarely adopted by the Copernican camp, it was even contested by some of them; as for the geocentrists, it held no appeal for them whatsoever. Did this argument of convenience therefore not benefit from the self-evidence attributed to it by Copernicus, and from, in his wake, it's continued support by a good many commentators? As is often the case when it comes to the history of thought, the pseudo-obviousness of this argument is merely the fruit of a blatant anachronism: presenting heliocentrism as the cosmological system that finally grants the Sun its worthy centrality by placing it in the centre of the room and not in a corner, is to ignore the fact that this star of the day already enjoyed, in geocentrism, a centrality esteemed to be perfectly in keeping with both its dignity and its inherent illuminative function. Having lost their grasp on this worldview that no longer belonged to them, the Copernicans thus put forward an argument which, for the geocentrists, is worthless. Yet they could have argued the objective superiority of their centrality over that accorded to the Sun by geocentrism: while the latter is only numerical, on a purely planetary scale, and frankly fictitious, the former is thoroughly spatial, of cosmic proportions and, at least on first approximation, very real. In order to produce arguments of convenience that could carry their own weight, the protagonists of the new cosmology would have benefited from getting to know the world vision of their adversaries a little better instead of addressing them from their own point of view; similarly, instead of treating as an obvious fact that which is only evident to one of the two parties present, historians of scientific thought would also be well advised to have a better understanding of the world vision of those who history now considers as the losers! (shrink)

Cumulative technological culture (CTC) refers to the increase in the efficiency and complexity of tools and techniques in human populations over generations. A fascinating question is to understand the cognitive origins of this phenomenon. Because CTC is definitely a social phenomenon, most accounts have suggested a series of cognitive mechanisms oriented toward the social dimension (e.g., teaching, imitation, theory of mind, and metacognition), thereby minimizing the technical dimension and the potential influence of non-social, cognitive skills. What if we have failed (...) to see the elephant in the room? What if social cognitive mechanisms were only catalyzing factors and not thesufficient and necessaryconditions for the emergence of CTC? In this article, we offer an alternative, unified cognitive approach to this phenomenon by assuming that CTC originates in non-social cognitive skills, namely technical-reasoning skills which enable humans to develop the technical potential necessary to constantly acquire and improve technical information. This leads us to discuss how theory of mind and metacognition, in concert with technical reasoning, can help boost CTC. The cognitive approach developed here opens up promising new avenues for reinterpreting classical issues (e.g., innovation, emulation vs. imitation, social vs. asocial learning, cooperation, teaching, and overimitation) in a field that has so far been largely dominated by other disciplines, such as evolutionary biology, mathematics, anthropology, archeology, economics, and philosophy. (shrink)

Si on veut penser le pouvoir à partir de l'exclusion des femmes, à partir de leur situation dans le politique, l'examen des images dont elles font l'objet en tant que groupe dominé offre, semble-t-il une perspective intéressante. Penser le pouvoir à partir des images de femmes (dans les films, les romans, les journaux, mais aussi les discours), c'est tenter de voir ce qu'elles disent de la conception et de la représentation traditionnelles du pouvoir, puisqu'elles aboutissent, permette...

Si on veut penser le pouvoir à partir de l'exclusion des femmes, à partir de leur situation dans le politique, l'examen des images dont elles font l'objet en tant que groupe dominé offre, semble-t-il une perspective intéressante. Penser le pouvoir à partir des images de femmes (dans les films, les romans, les journaux, mais aussi les discours), c'est tenter de voir ce qu'elles disent de la conception et de la représentation traditionnelles du pouvoir, puisqu'elles aboutissent, permette...

Au résumé de la thèse de Gilligan et Snider déjà présenté dans les articles précédents, l’autrice ajoute que femmes et hommes ainsi différenciées reconnaissent chacun·e leur vulnérabilité et celle de l’autre, ce qui les met sur la voie de l’égalité. Le film Atlantique de Mati Diop offre une belle illustration de cette théorie. On y voit les jeunes femmes reprendre à leur compte la revendication de dignité de leurs amis morts en mer dans le drame de l’émigration.

Les juridictions consulaires constituaient d’anciennes juridictions d’exception françaises, créées aux Temps modernes. Les juridictions d’exception – qui avaient une attribution de compétence spécialement déterminée – étaient nombreuses sous l’Ancien Régime, mais les juridictions consulaires ont été les seules à survivre à la Révolution, qui les a rebaptisées en «tribunaux de commerce». En effet, il s’agissait de juridictions originales par leur origine (elles ont été créées sous l’impulsion des marchands et négociants qui voulaient soustraire la connaissance de leurs litiges aux juridictions (...) royales de droit commun), leur composition (les juges consulaires étaient des marchands et négociants élus par leurs pairs), leur fonctionnement (rapides et gratuites, elles se différenciaient des juridictions royales de droit commun, dont la procédure était notoirement lourde et chère, les juges étant en partie rémunérés par les plaideurs) et le droit appliqué (le droit commercial, né d’usages créés par la pratique et qui n’avait été que partiellement codifié par l’ordonnance de 1673). (shrink)

An Enduring Suffering. Changes in the Female Body and the Creation of a Pharmaceuticals Industry Imaginary. The article discusses the findings of a survey concerning the psychodynamics of work which was undertaken among employees in the pharmaceuticals industry. The survey sought to probe the psychological effects following from the closing-down of their company. The evocation of the bodies of their female fellowemployees who had suffered certain masculinising modifications, and of the premature death which was the fate of some, played a (...) central role in the evocation of the current suffering of those who had earlier been their colleagues. The placenta, the scientific material with which they worked, thus became collated with the anxiety-laden fantasies of the two woman researchers. The author of the article therefore addresses the status of the researcher’s body in the interpretation of her findings, and the place of fantasy, and the creation of an imaginary, in a protocol of research and action involving the socialisation of an actual trauma in a milieu where cases of the contamination of bodies are both secret and random. Gender mutation thus fulfils a metonymic function, insofar as it is the sole visible manifestation of the violation, whether real or imagined, of bodily integrity. (shrink)